Ken Burns regarding America's creation of our National Parks: "The first impulse was spiritual. This was the American impulse that I could find God in these places in nature better than a dogmatic devotion in a cathedral".

wow, so perfectly correct

Look for it on PBS next month...and I think PBS has an HD channel so, bonus!

the greatest time to be alive...

Click him to get more ramblings from him
(and double your dosage first)
~Cosmo

2008! wow! 2007 was quite a year...crazy shit going on in the world man.
instant crazy shit too.

As soon as it happens somebody’s filming it! everybody is a star!
For at least a quarter of an hr.

I feel as if the momentum of the planet is picking up too...
yeah. ok I guess every person who has ever lived on earth thinks they are alive at the greatest moment in the planet's existence.... maybe not.

I can't assume to think someone else’s thoughts so I'll derail that train, but everything feels faster to me at least. I am one of those people who thrive in chaos. When the world is completely out of control I feel the most lucid.

I remember 9/11 and how singularly focused I was...because I simply thought it was the end of the world. So, when I look around and see wars and devastating weather occurrences and assassinations and wild west shoot ‘em ups and plane crashes, I feel right at home! I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I live life as an observer and not wholly a participant. How I can be in a situation and looking through my eyes I am reporting or telling a story as I perceive it. So when the bullets fly and motorcycles are jumping over my head, I somehow speed up while everything slows down (like in an accident) all is slow motion as I stroll through the carnage ducking the tire iron flying slowly by and embedding into the slow moving chap beside me!

You know, in these times I think of what Morpheus said in the matrix...how even the air we breathe is not real...so what is (IS) real? That is (IS) the key! What is real to me: is it completely different from what is real to you? What I see: is it what you see? More than likely… maybe. I would not know that unless I were you and what I see is me. The world is full of movement and my brain's eye can see thing's much more clearly lately (thank god for prescriptions!) HA!

And just because what I see is what I want to see I'm not crazy enough to jump off a building…yet! Because for the time being I am a slave to the basic physics of the planet...if I drop a brick it will fall on my foot and cause pain. But when a shaolin priest drops a brick what happens? First of all he would not be picking up a brick. second of all there I go assuming I know what a fucking shaolin monk would think....even though I've watched every episode of kung fu and both kill bill's. I have no idea what David Carradine thinks but if I did...I would probably just try to get used to the fact that i could levitate. Like Jet Li in hero. It's a consciousness thing where the world slows down and you stay at "regular" speed...but really you are slowing down the activity by sheer will of what you expect or know to be what you perceive as "real"...but can that alter the world that others occupy?

hahahaha


what others?

more from cosmo here

Determinism? What’s the point of getting out of bed then?!!!

~Chris

From a paper that I wrote on Sartre in Fall of '07

Two points here:

1) “It was (or wasn’t) meant to be.”

I cannot believe that things are planned in advance.

That is just too easy and a much too lazy way to live your life.
Life IS randomness. Oh perhaps YOU may be pre-determined to some extent- but not your life.

2) Perception is reality.

I do believe that this phrase truly applies to everything that happens in this life. Where you stand determines what you see.

Happy? Sad? Hopeless? Inspired?

If you want to change what you see then change where you stand.
Likewise, if you want to alter your stance, then change how you look at things.

Gang, we cannot keep randomness from occurring.
But, we can indeed determine how to act upon that randomness in our lives.

I will never believe that God determined that I would get leukemia. And I do not believe that some old man in the clouds hovering over His chess board decided that I should live from that wretched disease. But, I do believe that this “source” or the “ground of all being” was there and worked with me to kick cancer’s dick in the dirt when I let It help me.

And I will take my universal source of all energy over your wizard in a throne room, thank you very much.

So, Sartre said,

“Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of,

and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose.”

My friends:

Your perception IS your reality.

In the end,

there is no one to judge us in the way that we judge ourselves.

And many times, it is in our judgment of ourselves that others will decide just how we are to be judged.

Evolution

~Jason

Evolution.

I don’t believe in it. Not to say that I don’t believe that living things evolve.
But, if there was such a thing it stopped the day we learned how to speak.

The main thing we use language for is to get someone to do, or get, something for us that we could do ourselves. We use it to hurt and belittle more than to help and support. And then this religion thing raises its ugly head. Killing people in the name of one’s GOD. What a weak GOD that must be not able to handle that part Himself.

And lying…. How quickly a baby learns to cry to get what they want although not in pain. Rewarded, the crying turns to words and lies, as the grow, embedded in their vocabulary as a means of getting others to do or get something they could get for themselves.

If we just could have kept our mouths shut a few more millennia. Spoke from the heart with our eyes, like the wolf, maybe we’d have something to say worth hearing.

It is difficult to live in the present,
ridiculous to live in the future,
and impossible to live in the past.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.


~Jim Bishop

You should be doing this with your life

~Chris

Do This
Do That

Society says we should be doing this with our lives
The church tells us we should be doing that with our lives

We should be doing this for our family
We should be doing that for our children

We should be doing this for our finances
We should be doing that for our church

We should be doing this for the community
We should be doing that for the environment

Growing up we were told of what we should do with our lives

Our parents said we should be doing this with our lives
Government tells us we should be doing that with our lives

Our spouses claim we should be doing this with our lives
Capitalism says we should be doing that with our lives

Holidays demand money so that means we should be doing this with our lives
Religion claims us unworthy which commands us to be doing that with our lives

What did you do this month?

What did you do this year?

What are you doing tomorrow when you get up?

What do you "have" to do?

According to who?

So, just what should you be doing with your life?

And here is all I have discovered:
If you can completely shatter everything that you have been instructed about what you Should…Be…Doing

If you can completely tear down the guilt-ridden paradigm of what you Should…Be…Doing with your life, then you can do absolutely nothing for a change

Do nothing

Yes nothing…

To do absolutely nothing "for a change"
I mean NO THING… whether it be for just five minutes or Five hours… Five days…
Five weeks, Five months or even Five years

Just be quiet…. and do…. No…. Thing…

You may then have a chance to abandon all of the things

that you think that you

should be doing with your life

in order to finally have a comprehension

of all of the magnificent things that you

could be doing with your life